As far as wish fufillment in a video game goes, F1 2011 has to be right up there. For a guy who can barely handle his dumpy Peugeot around the streets of Surrey, clambering behind the wheel of a formula one car and hammering the straights of Monza and Silverstone at 180mph is a ... bracing experience. Scratch that, it’s absolutely, brilliantly terrifying.

Negotiating the claustrophobic hairpins of Monaco as the rain smashes into the tarmac and 23 other cars jostle for position is ferociously intense... as it should be. Codemasters are building on their terrific outing last year with F1 2010, and the watchword for this new iteration is authenticity. The handling model is heavier and deliciously twitchy, translating the weight of the cars while allowing you the surgical precision the sport requires. Scuff your turn, though, and the animal will buck, spinning you out onto the gravel as your rivals whisk past.

It’s a great improvement in handling terms, but while the focus is on realism, F1 remains terrifically enabling. Codemasters want the most convincing representation of the sport, but refuse to leave the uninitiated behind. A wide range of driving assists and customisable car and race setups allow for different skill and enthusiast levels. So you can zip around Spa in three laps, admiring the lovely trees while the game handles pesky distractions like, y’know, the brakes, or you can adjust the left camber of your car by 0.5 in order to caress the apex of the Eau Rouge corner during a full 44 lap marathon with the traction control turned off.

Either way, car management, patience and careful maneuvering all play a greater part in the racing. Kick up gravel and debris will visibly stick to your wheels, reducing grip, tyre selection can shave seconds off your lap times and race stewards will be hot on any dodgy driving. A little too hot perhaps. An illegal overtake is greeted by an immediate 10 second penalty, without the opportunity to let the offended retake their place. There can be a lack of feedback to any misdemanour too, a few times I’ve been called up on an illegal pass and I’ve honestly had no idea where I’ve gone wrong. I have no doubt it was my own fault, but a little more info on my indiscretion would have been welcome.

Largely, though, the engineer chatter over the radio adds a great deal to the tactics and authenticity of a race, keeping you updated on when they predict other drivers will pit, how the car is holding up and encouraging you to open up DRS and pass the rival hogging the track ahead of you. Both DRS and KERS --new additions to the F1 rules this year-- are handled comfortably. A stab of Y opens up the flap on the rear wing, reducing drag on a straight, but sends your back end twitching if you keep it open round corners. While KERS is a simple, limited boost, hardly unfamiliar to video games. Also added to F1 2011 is the (optional) safety car, a highly requested feature from fans after it was left out of F1 2010.

Opposing driver AI throughout F1 2011 is notably strong too. They will drive clever, searching for gaps to overtake you rather than just barrelling through and sticking to their pre-ordained racing line. The first corner of any race is always a fascinating scuffle, as all 24 drivers jostle for position without blindly bumping into each other. Well, the AI drivers anyway.

The racing ties into a strong career mode, though not one without room for improvement. The greatest strength of F1 2011‘s career is making every second on the track count. You start off with as a rookie, offered contracts from a handful of lower teams, and your targets are set accordingly. To begin with you will be expected to qualify around the middle of the grid, and hopefully nick a few extra places in the race itself, beating your team mate in a friendly rivalry while your at it. Qualifying is just as thrilling as a race, as you’ll squeeze everything out of the allowed twenty minutes track time to shave milliseconds off your laps, even just to gain a single place on the grid. There’s not a great deal of fancy fripperies within the career that ground you into the experience, but Codemasters manage to keep you invested by just making the whole race weekend so wonderfully competitive.

That’s not to say some of the aspects that frame the action couldn’t use a little finessing. Your hub is a nicely rendered motorhome, with access to emails from your engineers and (real-life) team owners, information on the next track and the chance to choose your helmet design. Racing is accessed through a calendar, but getting from motorhome to track takes far longer than it should, with a couple of lengthy loading screens in between slowing everything down. You also have to take part in TV interviews in between sessions. It’s a nice touch, but the questions are often repetitive, wooden and out of context. Continuously asking me if I’m expecting to challenge for the drivers championship in my first season with Lotus seemed a bit unneccesary (even considering a spectacular victory in Shanghai... just saying). Theoretically your responses will affect how other drivers react to you and have an impact on contract negotiations, though in my experience it all seemed rather inconsequential.

Still, these are niggles, and Codemasters has concentrated on making sure the more important stuff is taken care of first. And in that, F1 2011 is a success, providing a compelling learning curve as you improve your reputation and perhaps move to one of the bigger teams to eventually challenge for the championship. There’s a sense of progression that works from a narrative and mechanical point of view, as new players start off with a large amount of driving assists and slowly strip away the helping hands as they improve. Here, Codemasters have struck a terrific balance.

Things have improved online too, with grids of 24 (16 human players + 8 AI) now able to compete in online Grand Prix. While the most significant multiplayer addition is the online co-op Career. Two friends join the same team and play through a season in an attempt to win the constructors championship, as well as the more important business of outdoing your partner. It’s a bit of a shame that this mode is only available online, rather than split screen, though presumably this is for technical reasons. F1 2011‘s framerate is unwavering in singleplayer --another improvement over 2010-- but the possibility of having 48 cars on screen for a split-screen career probably gave the coders chills. So, for now, split screen racing is limited to smaller races.

It’s refinement rather than revolution for F1 2011, then. But Codemasters have made a plethora of improvements under the bonnet, polishing an engine that should prove a fantastic basis for the planned yearly iterations of their F1 franchise. On this evidence, it’s in safe hands, a love of the sport is prevalent throughout F1 2011, channelled into making a video game that is as exciting, intense and engaging as any released this year.